On This Mother’s Day

Published by Jamie on May 11, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments .

We had a wonderful Mother’s Day today.  Milt and I took some time off and drove over to Devil’s Tower in eastern Wyoming to help a friend celebrate the release of her new book (Standing Witness by Jeanne Rogers).  As you go west outside of Spearfish, the land is so beautiful it never fails to take my breath away.  There are red earth cutaways, rolling low mountains leading up to the Bear Lodge Mountains and then-Devil’s Tower.  The only place that even comes close is those beautiful Badlands that I have been driving through twice a week for the past nine months. 

Milt drove, I built Bead People and we talked all the way over there.  It feels like after several weeks of trying to define what we want to do with our eclectic websites, we finally had a break through and the vision cleared.  We decided we need to put a divider between our creative selves and the website that offers those creative works to others (otherwise known as ‘the business’).  Our plan is to create a very simple publisher’s site that offers books, CDs, and films (all downloadable) with some teacher-friendly lesson plans for each piece.  We also recognize that all of the material we produce is heart-friendly, spirit-friendly and earth friendly.  Bit by bit we will upload the many voices of Indian Country that we have collected over the years as well as material on the family, on health, on sustainable living and all that jazz.  It will take some time but we’ll manage it.

But tonight, I want to talk about something else besides Mother’s Day or our constantly looping plans.  For the past year I have not been able to attend my favorite writer’s group, The Bear Lodge Writers of Sundance, WY.  I was several years in their midst on a twice monthly basis.  In that time I grew as a writer so much.  So many nights I risked a new piece (or an old piece) on this group with a quivery voice only to finish and have them  offer such encouragement that I began to think I really could do this writing thing.  They saw me through the writing and publication of Washaka, and celebrated with me when it began to do well.  Today, I even saw a space on the bookshelf at Devil’s Tower that had been reserved for an order of my book. 

Early on in my life I needed groups that offered a more therapeutic support for who I was becoming.  That was good and useful in its time, but I realize more and more that we all need a circle of support for our creative development.  Risking the creation of something new in the world is like having a baby-it sometimes feels painful, awkward, and even life-threatening.  We need a birth coach to progress during the uncertain times of new creation because we are all mothers at this time, male and female alike.  And if we are coaching that other mother in creating the new thing, we need to coo and ooh over the infant creation, and we need to hold its head firmly as it gains strength. 

Today feels more like Thanksgiving to me.  I feel like giving thanks to all who have been such a part of my life.  There are no words adequate to describe the gifts and gifts that have been given with no request for a return gift.

I hope you all had as wonderful a day as I had.  Find or form your own creative group and give no more time to the angst and negativity that seems to surround us like a storm.  The sun is still shining.  Always.

School is over for the summer and my plan is to take a long, cool drink at my own creative fountain. 

Jamie

My Aunt Carol

Published by Jamie on May 7, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , .

It has been awhile since I posted any fiction.   I clicked through files and found this story.  It has never been published but it did find an interesting home.  In the nineties when Milt and I were producing radio documentaries, we decided to do a documentary on the human heart-is it just a biological pump . . . or something more?  While deciding the approach, we thought it would be fun to weave ordinary documentary material with fiction, and I chose this story to use as a backdrop for the documentary called “You Got to Have Heart”.  It is still probably one of my favorites of all the documentaries we produced during that time.  We had some fun with composed music, poetry, fiction plus real interviews with heart transplant patients, the doc who first performed a heart transplant using a machine instead of a real heart.  The show aired nationally on PRI on Valentine’s Day.  You can still get it on a CD or (soon) as a download.  Go to www.oyate.com and visit the store to find it. 

 Be sure to leave a comment or sign up to get this blog.  It keeps me writing to know people are actually reading it.  JL

 My Aunt Carol

 ”Oh, you know how your Aunt Carol is . . . ”

I was twelve the first time my mother said that to me, like I really did know. Or like I possessed a wisdom beyond my years or something.  I did not know how my Aunt Carol was.  Not then anyway.

Aunt Carol lived in Santa Fe in one of those old adobe houses just a few blocks from the main plaza.  Mom was worried about her poor sister in Santa Fe, so we went to visit her, just mom and me.  It was my first trip out of South Dakota so I was pretty excited. Anything past Newcastle, Wyoming was “the big world.”  You see, at twelve, I had this lump in my middle; I mean, it wasn’t a real lump, not like a hunchback’s lump or anything, but it was a thing buried down there somewhere and I could feel it.  It made me hungry all the time for wanting to know about stuff.  So when my mom said “You know how you’re Aunt Carol is.” I checked the lump to see did I know?  What did I know?  What should I know?  I really wanted to know.

Aunt Carol was selling her furniture and most of her belongings.  Mom’s cousin called in early May from Los Alamos-that’s where they made the Bomb, you know.  Anyway, the cousin visited Auntie, learned about the selling of the furniture and the belongings, and called my Mom IMMEDIATELY because she thought my Mom should know what Carol was up to NOW.

On the trip to Santa Fe, Denver was my favorite.  It showed up all smeary and gray with cars and city scattered everywhere like a lost monopoly game.  The whole world was so buried in clouds that I couldn’t even see the Rocky Mountains until Denver was already behind us.  Then, all of a sudden, we flopped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS.  I almost cried, the lump hurt so hard.  But I didn’t want Mom to think I was like her sister or something so I pretended I wasn’t even very impressed when we just dropped out of the clouds and there they were.  THE MOUNTAINS. 

I tried to get it out of my Mom.  “What’s wrong with selling your furniture?”  Mom had that pinched, whitish look when I asked that, her eyes squinting and red lipstick bunching together making her lips look as thin as fingernail cuttings.

“Your Aunt is very peculiar, dear, a dreamer . . . ” and then her sentence just dropped like dust onto the dashboard.

Oh sure, well that explains everything, I thought.  I’m not usually sarcastic but her answer made me crazy.  I didn’t know much about my Aunt.  I knew she had done a lot of neat things like gone to college, traveled through Europe, got married, got divorced.  “What does Aunt Carol do for a living?” I asked Mom.  The question sounded absurd to me.  We were south of Colorado Springs now.  The thing that seemed absurd was the way adults say “for a living” and here I was, twelve years old, and saying it myself like it was a sacred mantra or like it meant something to me.  Do for a living.  It sounded sort of once removed from life, like when somebody says “her cousin, by marriage” as a way of letting you know they are not REALLY related.  That was how “for a living” sounded to me and yet here I was asking my Mom what Aunt Carol did “for a living”.

Mom wasn’t much for talking right then.  She just sort of stared and drov and drove and stared.  I felt like we had separate rooms and she had her door closed, so I read a book, felt for the lump, and wondered exactly HOW peculiar Aunt Carol was going to be.  I secretly hoped she would be VERY peculiar so I could be like Mom and say how very peculiar my Aunt Carol is.  That would be something.  I have a peculiar Aunt who lives in Santa Fe without any furniture. 

Maybe I needed something out of the ordinary or maybe it was the lump in my middle that made me feel so peculiar.

Soon we mounted Raton Pass like it was a pony and tumbled down toward Santa Fe.

Santa Fe was something; all the streets named “Calle” instead of regular street names like Oak or Maple.  And no sharp corners on the buildings, just round adobe edges like castles in beach sand.  Even the shabby tumbling adobes looked like they belonged there, not like you should toss a little gasoline on them and remove them like the wobbly wood houses in my hometown.  Mom surprised herself by finding Aunt Carol’s place without getting horribly lost. 

Mom and Aunt Carol hugged and laughed and cried and spun little circles on the stoop of Carol’s adobe.  I was surprised.  I really expected my Mom would be much more reserved around such a peculiar person, but she wasn’t, she wasn’t at all.

Aunt Carol didn’t know about the cousin informant or that my Mom already knew about the missing furniture.  Evidently, Aunt Carol had taken up collecting pretty old furniture and antiques years earlier and had quite a collection before she decided to sell it all.  But I had been instructed to not SAY A WORD about the furniture.  (Mom’s can be so peculiar sometimes, weaving a lie just so.)  Anyway, I was naturally dying for them to stop hugging and crying and get on with it.  Finally we got our bags from the trunk and went into Carol’s house.

My mother seized the moment.  “Carol.  My God.  What has happened to all your beautiful furniture???”  I grinned.  I couldn’t help myself-the lump was giggling.  (I was beginning to think of it as a friendly sort of tumor.) As for myself, I was disappointed.  I’m not sure what I expected but it wasn’t this.  There was, well, no furniture, not that her living room was empty.  Not at all.  There just wasn’t anything regular like you expect to see when you go into an ordinary old living room.

 Carol grinned at me (why did she grin at me?) and winked.  I felt like I had snuck in and sold her furniture myself.  Aunt Carol looked at my mom and said, “I sold it, Beth.”

That was all she said.

“But why?  Why would you sell all those lovely old pieces?”

I finally really looked around.  I didn’t know what she sold but  I thought what was left looked better than most anything I’d ever seen.  The floors were wood, shiny as marbles, with thick, velvety rugs everywhere that had flowers and fancy designs dancing around their borders.  Giant colorful pillows were stacked in one corner around a low table with a glass top (the ONLY piece of furniture in the room).  Above us, a cloth fan-folded screen drifted down from the ceiling and almost hugged the low table.  There were no lamps except for ghostly white paper globes, three of them, each a different size.  I say ghostly not because they were white paper but because they were so light they looked like chubby angels flying above us, still swaying from when we came in the door. 

That was about it.  A few pictures on the walls and, oh yeah, two other things.  One was a painted wooden carousel horse that, had I been six and not twelve, I would have already been on its back riding like the wind.  The other thing was a large painter’s easel that held a huge canvas filled with flowers. 

It stopped me.  That painting.  I could almost smell those flowers and it made the lump ache awful to look at them.  I wanted to pluck a flower from that beautiful, ironed-flat garden, but couldn’t bring myself to touch it.  Carol, my most peculiar Aunt, was looking my way out of the corner of her eye, smiling while she talked patiently to my Mom.  I got the feeling that she saw the lump and maybe wanted to paint it or something. 

I didn’t know my peculiar Aunt was a painter.  I was a painter.  Or at least I secretly dreamed about being one.  I could remember my first box of crayons like it was yesterday, each waxy stick glowing hot like colored candles.  My Aunt Carol watched me, still smiling, and then she turned back to my Mom. “Oh, Sis, that old furniture didn’t mean anything to me anymore.  That’s all.  And I needed the space to do my painting.  This isn’t a very large house, you see, and all those heavy dark things were so . . .  so heavy I couldn’t breathe.”

“But, Carol, what did you DO with it all?”

“I sold some.  Gave some away.  You know.”

Now my Aunt was saying, “You know” to my mother as if she did know.  She didn’t know.  I could tell by the way her face moved against itself like a lake in a storm.   She definitely did not know!  But what I didn’t know was why Mom looked so pinched and why Aunt Carol looked all lit up like there was a candle behind each eye.  Shining.  That was what I wanted to find out about my Aunt Carol.  Mom couldn’t get her mind off what was missing long enough to notice what was there.  When Carol and my Mom went into the kitchen to drink tea and “get to the bottom of this,” Carol took her garden painting off the easel, handed me her pallet and brush, placed a small stretched white, whiter than snow canvas on the easel, winked again, and said, “Here baby, have some fun.” 

         *              *               *

 I’ve been looking for My Aunt Carol all my life but, instead of an easel with a glorious flower garden splattered and taking root on a canvas, I have a neat, tight-assed little computer, a Papermate pen, and reams of paper painted in ink and pink and purple and blue and black and every bit as beautiful as my Aunt Carol’s canvas. 

It’s the Gypsy in me.  I must have been a Gypsy in a past life because, sometimes, I forget that I’m not in this lifetime.  When she visits me, I’m older than time, younger than a minute.  If not constantly vigilant, I could mistake my Suburu wagon for a Gypsy caravan and find myself loading it with a few pots and pans, a set of tarot cards, writing a bad check, and off I go. 

The first time the Gypsy came I was in college killing myself to make enough money to deserve to be there. Unfortunately, I discovered that Highway Two runs not only through Bemidji, Minnesota but keeps on going all the way to the west coast until it reaches the Puget Sound.  This was a perilous discovery. 

How about it?  Pretend I don’t know I am a student, tuition paid by pushing drinks in a supper club filled with people floating around the bar like amoebas in a primordial sea that smelled strangely of Miller Beer?  Simply forget?  Become a Gypsy in a greenish-blue Buick speeding toward the Puget Sound?  Couldn’t get lost if I tried?  The map promised that-an invitation out of lake country.  The Gypsy read my palm and promised me a long loose life if I followed that single line west-all the way west. 

Of course, I never did.  I never followed Highway Two all the way to the Puget Sound.  I was a responsible student, after all, sitting in intro to education classes with puffed up professors declaring that I would soon hold the youth of America in my hands, the power to mold the young minds of the future.  Ha!  What Gypsy, running west with bangle earrings and inner voices could lure me from such a noble path?  I ignored her and she slept like Van Winkle for a hundred years.

A second Gypsy invitation came years later in Colorado, while stuck on a prairie with car trouble, three kids, and a husband who thought my name was “Whythehelldidn’tyou?”  When we finally made it off the stark yellow prairie to a hotel room, the television lulled the stretched-tight rubber band family back into shape.

I went for a walk down a concrete sidewalk thinking about whether to step on the cracks or not, and whether it would do any good or not.  Now that I was a mother, I considered these things more carefully.  I thought I wanted only a cup of coffee, a short respite from the kids, but somewhere along that sidewalk she jumped out of the covered caravan of my mind and joined my walk. 

“We could walk across Colorado” she said. “To the mountains.  To the sea. 

“You mean not go back to that hotel room.  Not go back to him?” I queried. 

“Yeah, I mean not go back.” 

I was shocked, naturally.  My heart began beating rapidly, and I shivered.  She went for me then. 

“You know all those people who just disappear?  They aren’t lost.  They know where they are.  You would know where you were, too.  Maybe for the first time ever, you would know.  Even if nobody else did!”

I got hot.  And then I got cold.  Would he report me as a missing person?  Would he even notice me missing?  True, it was a miserable life I was leading.  Who could blame me? But would they spend forever wondering was I alive, dead, disappeared?

That time it was short, chubby little arms that reached out a great distance to pull my ears and grab my hair.  He was only two, my son.  Somehow that two seemed more powerful than a Highway named Two.  I never thought of fate as having little fat pudgy hands and fingers that, had I left, would have clutched at me until forever was over.  So there you are.  No Gypsy–and no Aunt Carol. 

Although later I did unload most of the furniture, and him, (my husband, not my son) and invited the Gypsy to bring her computer and tambourine and come live with us.  She hangs out in the kitchen before a bright white stretch of countertop like a short road, and dreams about the sea while watching the apple tree bud, bloom, bear, drop, and rot, only to start all over again.  She never lets me forget that she is near. 

 

 

creative, generative, colorful, exciting, zesty, juicy, visionary, joyful plans

Published by Jamie on May 6, 2008 in Bead people, Indian Country, On Becoming Human and Writing. 1 Comment .

Tonight I realized that a single comment from a reader motivates me to continue writing in this “virtual” kitchen.  That is how I think of it.  You and I have just sat down with a cup of coffee or tea and we get to talk together about life.  Anyway, thanks for writing Renee. 

 I have been in such a mind tornado lately, trying to make good decisions about the future, trying to see INTO the future.  It doesn’t work for me.  One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that my body is a better director than my mind.  The other day I just got tired of thinking and so I re-entered the novel I began last summer but never got back to after school started.  It is called “Still Mountain” and is placed in the same world as an earlier novel called “Silver”.  Still Mountain is the center and the source of all stories.  My characters are all caught in a story world, in a world where stories come alive.

I think about what the yogis say about Shiva.  Shiva opens his eyes and the world springs into existence-Shiva closes his eyes and it is gone.  As soon as I opened my notebook and re-entered my earlier story, all else disappeared from view.  I love that feeling.   My life is good and I wouldn’t change anything, but the story world is . . . wow.

This past week has been so sweet.  The other day a Lakota woman, my Elder, suggested that I should write a book about me.  I laughed a little and said there is nothing special about me or my life.  She said, “But you give us so much.  You make it okay for us to open.”  Then she explained that trusting a white person is difficult-but not with me.  She almost made me cry.  I hugged her and told her she had just given me a great gift.  I never, ever want to see color first and the human heart second.  She confirmed for me that I am seeing correctly.

Then this morning Milt and I did another Bead People session at the 9th Grade Academy.  The students there are doing a special give-away at the end of the year-everybody in the school and all supporters will get a Bead Person and the little Wind book.  What is so stunning to me is that these students have been placed in this school because they struggle in the mainstream educational system, but you should see them with the beads.  I set out large trays of beads and give them wire and tools and it is like a reverse cyclone.  All the dispersed energy of the room pulls itself toward the center and . . . the hands are busy building Bead People.  I guess that is one reason I love building the Bead People myself.  It forces me to leave my head and get into my hands and body.  If you are not familiar with this project, check out www.thebeadpeople.org on the web.  You may even have to try it.

I am a bit all over the map tonight but it feels good.  I have just a few more tests to give and then we have potluck good-byes (a tradition for final classes at OLC).  Then I am free for the summer.  Naturally, I have a list as long as my arm of things I want to do but number one is to get back to writing practice.  Nothing can happen in storyland unless I put pen to paper and see what will emerge.  Some writers plot things out ahead of time and make intricate outlines.  Me?  I walk out onto the diving board . . . a take a plunge. 

And oh, I am ready for a plunge.  The deeper the waters, the better. 

I hope you are all entering this fine spring with your own creative, generative, colorful, exciting, zesty, juicy, visionary, joyful plans.  Just set the hum drum aside for a few hours a day and enter the new land and see what might emerge. 

Goodnight my friends.

Jamie

 

 

 

 

Semester’s end . . .

Published by Jamie on May 1, 2008 in Essays, Indian Country, On Becoming Human and The Education Crises. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I am sitting out in Kyle, SD on the Pine Ridge Reservation watching a spring blizzard move in.  So strange–I could be home with my husband, warm and cozy.  We have meetings (maybe?) tomorrow and so I stayed here in the motel.  We have one more week of our semester at Oglala Lakota College and I have been testing students all week.  It is so strange–we have worked hard together all semester and I have seen them gain confidence, find their stride, and make great advances in learning how to learn.  I love it–and I hate that some “national” test gets to decide their fate and not me, their teacher. 

I can’t even imagine what the repercussions of this “test them” mentality will do on real learning.  At a time when we need to be showing people the power of creating and learning–we put them in a box instead.  It upsets me.  Sometimes I wish I could care less–how is that for a goal?  I know, it wouldn’t be me and it wouldn’t make any sense. 

On the other hand, I had a bunch of my “rapper” type students who sometimes smell like pot and who sometimes can’t make class pass through to the upper English class.  For each one, I put an ‘A’ on their test paper, shook their hands, and congratulated them. 

If I had my druthers (is that really a word?), I would re-write school like I have been re-writing my novel.  I would look for the most exquisite combination of creation, learning, energy work, challenge etc, etc.  I would make students plant gardens, test soil, make art and music, study only what interests them greatly.  I would not be a wise guy at the front of the room with a condescending attitude and a superior stick up my you know what. 

Guess I needed a rant and I also needed to post something.  I did get through the final little tweaky changes for ONE DRUM so I can send it off to my agent tomorrow.  Only 100 pages of tiny edits left.

Good night, friends.

Jamie

BRB

Published by Jamie on April 22, 2008 in Indian Country. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Today Milt (my husband) put up the first of what I hope will be many digital downloads of our recorded and filmed materials.  This one is particularly close to my own heart–Buddy Red Bow–The Lost Buffalo Tapes (www.oyate.com) During the nineties we produced an hour long show called The Buddy Red Bow Story.  For those of you who didn’t know BRB, he was one of the first (and greatest) contemporary Lakota musicians.  We produced a public radio program on his life to be aired on the anniversary of his death.  I remember when we were producing the show I was writing the script and I kept saying to Milt that it seemed pretty slim–not enough stuff.  He told me not to worry–Buddy’s music would carry the day.  When he finally finished the program, he dropped a tape in my lap on his way out the door and said, “Listen and see what you think now.” 

I put the tape on and listened to the whole show.  By the end, I was sitting on the couch crying and Buddy was singing “Don’t you worry–I’ll be back some day.”  Even having written the thing it touched my heart.  I hope you’ll take a listen.  The Buffalo Tapes and The Buddy Red Bow Show are two different things but all great. 

I am getting near the end of our semester and figure I won’t have much time to post for the next couple of weeks but will make an effort to flop something up now and then.  My blueberry plants are calling out to be planted (not that I have bought any yet).  I saw a patch of daffodils the other day and the prairie and Badlands are “going green.”

Peace,

Jamie Lee

Finishing One Drum

Published by Jamie on April 20, 2008 in On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

I haven’t been posting much lately because I am hard at work doing final edits on my novel, ONE DRUM.  Just for fun, I’ll paste the first couple of pages in here.   I am excited because a long winter of revision is over and I finally have an agent to take it to the marketplace.  I love this book and have been behind it for too many years. 

 

ONE DRUM
Chapter I

 February 27, 2003

 Cuny Table, a tabletop mesa in the heart of Lakota country, is an unlikely place for a restaurant. The mesa itself is a survivor, having held its ground as thirty-five million years of wind and rain eroded the land into what is now the Badlands of South Dakota. On its high top are a few scattered ranches, fields of winter wheat, and a view so wide it feels like the floor of heaven. Sketched along the skyline to the west are the Black Hills; and, on the northeastern edge surrounded by a few rough buildings, is the Cuny Café.

Agnes Stands Alone, the owner of the café, has been there as long as anybody can remember. She is an old, square-bodied woman with short, coarse hair and eyes like dark marbles that seem to see straight through you. The regulars call her Unci, or Grandmother in Lakota.  Most of them wander in not so much for the food (although the food is good) but for her company and the unusual tea she brews from plants gathered down in the Cheyenne River breaks. The old ones, especially, find Agnes’s tea eases their aching bones and makes the blood flow more easily to the toes. Oh, she makes no claims about her tea, but everybody who walks in gets a steaming cup slapped down before them with a brisk command to, “Drink up.”

The café, an old thirty-foot trailer, has been gutted, insulated, and made into one open space except for a back bedroom which nobody but Agnes has ever been in. The front has a single booth, two tables, and a plywood counter top covered with blue-flowered contact paper. Some strangers think the poor old trailer looks like a dislocated train car hooked to nothing, going nowhere.

Agnes never hesitates to give advice-or a solid scolding-when needed.  But, more than the tea or Indian tacos or advice or whatever is on the menu that day (everybody eats the same daily special), the locals go to the café for Agnes’s stories. She knows all of the old Lakota stories.  She knows the creation stories, the stories of Iktomi the trickster and the Seven Sisters who can still be seen winking down from the sky on a clear night.  Her favorite is the story of the Second Cleansing when Unci Makah grew tired of the antics of her human children and tossed all but a few off her powerful body.  According to the story, those She sheltered later emerged from Wind Cave as The Lakota People.

Agnes, however, doesn’t just tell old stories.  Sometimes she tailor-makes the story especially for the person hearing it. For instance, once J.J. Runs At Night had a new colt so sick it couldn’t stand.  Agnes told him a story about how a grove of young willows withstood the mightiest of storms by forcing their roots further into Unci Makah, Grandmother Earth. “Such smart, young trees,” she said, “to know just what to do.” By the time J.J. got home, the colt was running across the corral on four sturdy legs.

Another time, June Player’s daughter tried to die by cutting her wrists with the top of a tuna can. The poor girl nearly bled out before they found her.  For this dangerous moment, Agnes told June about a small ant who had lost his place in line-until the wind blew a single grain of sand across his path, forcing him to turn another way. The next day, June’s daughter woke up from her deep, uneasy sleep talking about needing to find her place-before it was too late.

A while later, the girl began writing poetry and gave Agnes this poem written in a smooth, pretty hand:

In the greater scheme of things

Only she who sings,

And learns to play the wind,

Will ever grow wings.

Now I play the wind.

Agnes took a pineapple-shaped magnet, stuck the poem to her fridge and said, “Good.” After that the young girl began hanging around the café helping Agnes peel potatoes and wipe off countertops.

Of the nearly forty thousand residents of The Pine Ridge Reservation, at least half of them have been in the Cuny Café at one time or another, not to mention visitors from Japan, Switzerland, Germany and many other places. Agnes keeps a guest book and feeds them all tea and stories.

On slow days, Agnes sits in an old rocking chair on the rough-lumber porch the regulars had built for her five years earlier and lights her pipe. When it’s not in use, she keeps the pipe in a small, beaded bag hanging on a nail beside the screen door like a good luck charm. The bowl is carved red pipestone from a quarry in southern Minnesota.  This particular stone, Agnes says, was once part of the Black Hills until it broke away and floated off during some ancient upheaval.

Agnes fills the pipe with a dried version of her tea; and while she smokes, she prays. Sometimes the praying takes her far off to what she simply calls “the other place.” The first time she visited this other place she had been only seventeen and drunk. Her uncle, a medicine man, had found her puking her guts out beneath an old cottonwood tree and taken her home and made her pray for three days straight without food or water. That ornery old man-he’d cut straight through her young spirit to the old woman already living there, and Agnes had never again been able to return to her ordinary life.

Now, when the locals drive up Cuny Table to grab a bite to eat and find her sitting so still with the pipe in her lap and the spirit absent from her eyes, they know not to disturb her and simply tromp up the steps to help themselves in her kitchen. Occasionally, the praying is so complete, so pervasive, that they find it impossible to cross her threshold and simply get back into their trucks and leave.

Agnes sees many things in the smoke curling up from her pipe; she sees the land, she sees distant places, she sees the beating hearts of the people, the breaking hearts of the people, the loving hearts of the people; and, sometimes, in the hazy curl she sees the old ones who once walked the earth but now watch from other realms. The old ones have stories of their own to tell; but Agnes never tells these stories to anybody except Bill Elk Boy.

 

It was one of these days, on the edge of winter, when Agnes cast her inner eye outward toward the weathered lands north of Cuny Table and saw the change coming. There, on a single square foot of dry, deserted earth in the Badlands north and west of Wounded Knee Village, a thin line of dust rose up from a single needle-mark in the sand. Agnes watched the whorl of dust curl upward like the smoke of her pipe.  It had no discernible color unless she used the very edges of her peripheral vision and then she saw the palest of pink light rising from a dark horizon. As she watched, the pale, moving spiral seemed to take shape, as if Creator was conjuring something from nothing, dancing dust into form. When the dust settled, she saw the form of a woman asleep in the sand and Agnes knew she had returned at last, the little one . . . the lost one.

Two young boys were walking toward the sleeping woman.

When the glaze cleared from her eyes and she again entered this ordinary realm, Bill Elk Boy was beside her. He took the pipe, the bowl now cold to the touch, tapped it clean on the edge of his chair, slipped it back into the beaded bag, and said, “It begins, Agnes. Today it begins.”

 

We Can’t Afford Not to Get it Right!

Published by Jamie on April 16, 2008 in Essays, On Becoming Human and The Education Crises. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Today Leon Hale and I gave a presentation about our book, Washaka—The Bear Dreamer to a classroom of students in an alternative school. It is a brand new, beautiful facility on the edge of the northern hills. The teachers are committed and determined to help these students who have been school referred, court ordered . . . or dumped . . . on them. I asked to use the bathroom when we first got there and somebody with a key had to let me in. She said the entire place was a “lockdown” facility. Not a single door there could be opened without a key. The teachers (bless their hearts) were skittish, constantly looking around, counting heads, monitoring behavior.

I wanted to say, FOR GOD’S SAKE—THESE ARE OUR CHILDREN!! I had a flash back to one of the first real jobs I had which was in an “Attention” center for troubled youth. I hated that place. It took children who have been knocked around by life and treated them as if they were criminals. I only lasted a few months at that job.

This past year I’ve been invited to be a part of a progressive international group that is forming around the youth. It is called Global Passageways and is made up of both young people and “elders” who are working their butts off to find a way to treat the young with respect and guidance. I don’t yet know what will be accomplished by this global movement, but I hope it is something soon.

Yesterday Milt attended a town meeting that was discussing a mere 4 million dollar shortfall in our local school system. On the cut list of services were all elementary music, all elementary librarians (can you believe it?), the gifted and talented program, and who knows what all. Sports were not on the list.

I cannot for the life of me understand what kind of a wake-up call it will take for us to understand that our priorities are completely and totally upside down in this country. If we don’t invest in the youth—we have no future. Simple as that. We can’t afford not to get it right. The cost will be much, much greater than a war in some distant land . . .

Goodnight. I shouldn’t get up so early . . .

On a positive note, I finally got an agent for one of my novels. The novel is about how Unci Maka (Grandmother Earth) takes pity on the human race and sends us a little help . . .

Jamie

Being and Becoming–a Parntership

Published by Jamie on April 13, 2008 in On Becoming Human. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

We did a Family Constellation Workshop this afternoon. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a group process that works deeply within the connected soul of the family of origin. By using representatives for family members, we can bring into visibility the hidden ties and loyalties that run through us. For the past ten years we have been coming together to do deep healing within the family and I am always amazed at the sheer amount of love that flows there. Today nearly everyone in the group tapped into that love and it was sweet and sad and beautiful all at the same time. Within all of our hearts there is still a little girl or boy who needs the energy of mother and father—no matter our circumstances. And when we fully take that energy, we can at last become fully adult.

I love facilitating the constellation work. It is like touching the face of the creator—or having the creator touch me. I started reading a book that a friend recommended called Teacher. On the first page the author said something like when we are creative—we cannot be destructive. I feel this. To fully take our adult strength and become a creative force in the universe is what it is all about. Unfortunately, many of us linger in childhood unable to take that strength and put it to work.

It is a long road, this path to full adulthood. Today I was trying to explain to the group that we do it the same way we learned as children. We must study the people around us and “steal” from them the qualities and ways of being that we most admire. We have to model behavior in order to gain that new behavior. We have to do it. I remember when I first started speaking to groups, I was so scared and so shy that I knew I needed a few new resources. I started to watch how other people behaved as teachers; and I would snatch a vocal quality here, a gesture there, a stronger voice or posture and then I would watch to see if it had the effect I was hoping for. Most of us don’t realize that new ways of being come in slowly—and only with great practice. Nobody “gets it” just like that.

Today I decided it is time for me to learn again how to gain even more strength in the world. Milt and I have both decided to go to the next level, together. As we do this, there are a couple of things I plan to be vigilant about. One is to take special care of the little, scared girl in me who always hates to risk new things; and the other is to look out and identify new models for me to emulate. Tonight we saw a wonderful show about a single man who introduced classical music to the poor children of Venezuela. The story was so inspiring that it brought tears to my eyes. Over 300,000 children playing instruments from the time they are two years old and up? I want to learn from that man.

Take good care and look around yourself to see what, if anything, you have to contribute to the creative pot of the world. And then do it.

I love this life. For those of you who are not familiar with Constellation Work, there are lots of resources (I hope the links all work) at http://www.manykites.com We have been doing so much messing around with the websites that I’m not exactly sure what is still working—but we will continue to add materials as we go along.

Jamie

All My Relatives

Published by Jamie on April 9, 2008 in Short Fiction. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Below is a story I wrote a number of years ago.  The genesis of this story is my own husband’s adoption story.  This story still touches my heart.

Jamie

 

 

All My Relations

by Jamie Lee

(Published by Heartlands Magazine, October 2005)

 

Bill carried the plain manila envelope around all day but every time his fingers reached toward the small metal clasp holding it shut they pulled away.  He drove home with the thing, like something alive, on the car seat next to him.  Normally he loved driving through the soft valley to their house tucked up against the Black Hills, but today he saw only the envelope.  He carried it into the house.  Jessie, his wife, knew instantly what it was. 

He went to the couch, sat down, opened the envelope, read the thin file of adoption papers for 13 minutes, got up, silently handed the papers to Jesse, and walked into the kitchen.  He polished the stainless steel teapot with a scratchy green pad and a pearl of dish soap.  He filled it with water, lit the stove, stared at the dancing blue flame, and then Jessie was standing behind him, arms circling his middle, saying, “Such a sad story, honey.  I can’t believe that this baby is you.” until sharp slivers of thought caught in the back of his mind.   

The soft, mothering part of Jessie made him want to tie feelings like small pouches of tobacco and hang them from her branches like prayers.  Later, she said what broke her heart was that he had no name, not for three months, except the names the nurses and nuns attached the nameless baby; Daniel in the hospital, later John or Peter in the mission.  And Jessie was furious at cruel, cutting notes scrawled into the records by well-meaning nuns referring again and again to how “fortunate” that Boy Daniel (or whatever) does not look too Indian. 

Bill was half Lakota, some Cherokee, some Cree, and who knew what else.  A breed, he thought.  It always comes down to that, breeds and pedigrees, a race of people forced to carry papers and proof of blood quantum.  It pissed him off.  Royally.  It did.  His only goal in opening the adoption file was to register with the tribe to get financial aid as an Indian for graduate school.  He hadn’t anticipated questions of place, and belonging, and blood quantum to thicken like blood pudding in his mind. 

It became the Indian Question.  What does it mean to be Lakota?  Blood, birth, state of mind?  He caught himself staring in bank windows at his own high cheekbones and wondering about Lakota, or staring down at the flat fingernails on the ends of his fingers, another sign.  And he didn’t understand Jessie saying “No wonder, honey!  Good God, no wonder.”  And when he questioned her she said only that he was always waiting.  

He didn’t quite get her meaning but the adoption papers had lit a lamp on the screen of his mind.  Scenes of a young mother staring through pane glass at the tiny bundled boy that is her son.  She is small, hair braided, cheek pressed to cold glass whispering “My son.”  The babies hair is dark like night sky, flying from his scalp.  She considers that it was his feet poking against her womb these many months, his fingers now uncurling and reaching–seeking her–only her.  And then she disappears, unable to sign the papers, unable to stay. 

How?  How could she do it?  It wasn’t a real question in Bill’s mind.  He knew how.  After years wandering around these South Dakota reservations, he’d seen a hundred girls just like her; scared, young, foolish, drunk, incested or raped by uncles and strangers, girls like his mother.   

The birth record said her name was Forrest.  What had it been before?  Had it been Stands in Timber or Catches the Wind?  What would his name have been if she had not given him up for adoption, if she hadn’t died, if the white man had not named her grandparents ‘Forrest’ to make the bookkeeping easier?

Three days after reading the papers Bill blew up at a guy who hung a Sundance skirt on a wall like a trophy animal.  The guy said he was a real Indian.  Bill told him to stuff it.  Sure he wasn’t raised on Pine Ridge.  Sure he’d had whiteman advantages, raised by a nice couple in eastern South Dakota, didn’t talk Lakota.  So what?  He’d trade it all to know a single grandfather, to have one uncle guide him into his vision, to sit in the Inipi ceremony and know just who the hell he was. 

Not Indian.  Not white.

If it weren’t for Jessie, he’d be a crazy man.  Jessie was white but had spent the first twenty-five years on a reservation in northern Minnesota.  Talk about racial confusion–she seemed more Indian than he.  Oh, how he loved watching her bow to the flowers, or spread her arms above her head to greet the sky or a tree.  She seemed born to the land although no Indian blood ran through her veins like red water. 

Bill tried to shake off confusion like a dog crawling out of a creek.  His confusion was compounded by Jessie’s odd delusions.  Last night she’d wrapped her arms around his middle and said once again.  “I think I’m pregnant”.  She crossed the room, sat down in the old orange, uglier-than-sin rocking chair that was too comfortable to throw out, and rubbed her belly in small circular motions.  Her face was round and soft and smiling as she stared at an oily spot on the wall across the living room. 

Bill didn’t understand.   “No honey, you know you aren’t pregnant.  You know that, so why do you keep bringing it up?”

“I don’t know.  I feel it.  I feel like I’m pregnant, that’s all.”

“Look honey.  You aren’t pregnant.  You couldn’t possibly be pregnant.  You know I had a vasectomy.  I’m forty-four, and you’ve had your babies and I’m sorry you didn’t have them with me, but you didn’t.  You aren’t pregnant.”  He didn’t want to sound exasperated but he was.  Bill loved Jessie, but strange things were about and he didn’t understand why or how it coincided with wanting to understand what is Lakota? 

To tell the truth, she looked pregnant.  She hadn’t gained weight or showed any physical signs, but her skin was clear and shining, her eyes bright and expectant. 

“Have you been dreaming again?” he asked her.

“Oh yes.”  She looked straight at him “Do you want to hear about it?”

“Sure.”  He smiled for the first time that day.

“This time we were up on a high trail at Bear Butte, almost a ledge, and there were others with us, all others, all of our relatives were there.  Oh Bill, it was the holiest place ever.”

She sounded like a young girl–not his thirty-eight year old wife and mate.  He crossed the room, sat on the floor at her feet, and rested his head against her knee, suddenly tired of thinking, and questions.  Jessie told him of her dream. 

“Part of the trail was buried with rock that had tumbled from above.  It had the strangest sound.  Bones, I thought.  It sounded like bones and broken crockery and I knew right away why this place is holy.  The whole mountain is nothing but bones; mountain bones, Indian bones, bones from animals, and god bones, and bird bones.  So many bones.”  She stopped talking and fanned all ten fingers out to feel his scull beneath her hands.  His scalped tingled as if her fingertips were fireflies emitting tiny chemical jolts into his scull.  His middle grew mossy, and he was afraid to breath, afraid that if he moved she too would fly off and leave him.  Waiting.  Waiting. 

She talked on.  “Then you took my hand and said come on.  I wanted to take one of the bones with me so I went down on my knees and found a small stone shaped like a scull.  I stuck it in my pocket but it was hot.  When I stood up, it felt like wind prayers coming from out across the plains and surrounding us.  Remember the sound of that silence, and that wind?  God, it was something.”  She laughed quietly and leaned her upper body to form a soft feminine shelter over him.  “Maybe that’s what made me pregnant.” 

He loved her dreams, words spreading over him like yellow cream, or surrounding them like an oily, rainbow-bubble flown from a child’s lips.  He wished he understood what gentle force gave her these sweet dreams but feared if he discovered the source, it would prove to be illusion only with no sweet blend of pious gentle love wrapping them both like a swaddling cloth. 

In this space it only mattered that he loved her.  All that was lost could be found again if he just stayed in this place with her.  He knew that.    “I wish I could give you a baby.  I do.”  He was apologizing. 

She shook her head and kissed his warm brow.  “I don’t need a baby silly.  I just need to be pregnant.”

Bill closed his eyes for a moment and saw a range of hills, dark-skinned and feminine, wearing the golden prairie like a skirt of soft, yellow buckskin.  Mother Earth.  She had birthed them all–that’s what the stories said.    This gentle mother had not given him away but, rather, drew him in closer and closer until his own heart beat a single rhythm with hers.  His painful questions suddenly lost their end marks and their power to wound.   

Jesse was pregnant.  So was he.  So were all the people, both on the reservation and off, because the earth herself was expecting, poised in a single breathless moment of waiting for the new time and in this time, they would all be born new.  Didn’t the old stories say it? 

And the Earth took the ones closest to her inside of herself…

 

The Mother Load

Published by Jamie on April 8, 2008 in Essays, On Becoming Human and Writings by J. Lee. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Tonight is the anniversary of my mother’s death and tomorrow (April 9) is the anniversary of her birth.  My relationship with my mother was a complicated one.  It is odd how when parents do it right their children sometimes get a little “too big for their britches.”  That was a favorite phrase that my father used when we tried to rule the household.  But my goal is to revisit my relationship with my mother tonight and not my dad. 

 My mother had eight children.  I was third girl and was followed by five brothers. 

 No, not a summary.  I want to do what Natalie Goldberg urges writers to do and ” write to the bone.” 

 I looked down at my mother for some reason.  I thought she was not very smart, that she took things too seriously (particularly her Catholic faith), and that she didn’t really “get” me.  I was always a dreamy little girl with my nose in a book and she was a busy mom with a large household to run.  I constantly felt guilty for not doing enough to help, and the shadow of that guilt still follows me today.  My mother was not good at saying what she meant and would always couch things in a kind of passive-aggressive way, speaking from the side of her mouth.  “Long suffering” is another term I’ve heard that describes my mom. 

 I often wondered what my mother did with her dreams and aspirations and I used that against her somehow.  How could she “settle” for so little?  Did she drown that dreamy part of her when she was young and never let her re-emerge?  And why did I think that who she was was not enough?  Didn’t she raise eight children to be creative and responsible adults? We are all still alive today and doing well raising families of our own. 

 As I think about it now, I think my own scornful thoughts were retaliation.  I wanted my mom to see ME.  I wanted her to tell me she was proud of me, that I had become someone she liked and admired.  I wanted her attention—desperately.  I still do. 

 Now I sometimes feel like my own children don’t get me; that they judge my life and find it wanting.  Isn’t it strange-what goes around comes around. 

 So on this, the eve of both her birth and death, I want to remember some of the things that were right with us.  Both Mom and I loved the quiet times.  My fondest memories are of putting puzzles together on rainy or snowy days, picking blueberries together, and playing scrabble for hours on end even though she never could beat me. 

 In my last year of college, I moved home to save money.  I was in my final semester of courses and planning a spring wedding.  I was tired . . . tired of thinking, tired of partying, tired of working so hard and pushing to put myself through college.  For one semester, instead of working so hard in a bar to pay the bills, I just moved home for the winter.  I did my classes, studied and then spent hours and hours and hours with my mom playing scrabble.  We didn’t talk much-my mother never was much for deep conversations but it was so comforting to just be there with her. 

 I am older now and wiser (I hope).  I realize fully that both of my parents gave me all I needed in order to pursue an education, create a nice life, and extend that life forward for my own children and my work.  I have the steadiness of my mother, the creativity of my father, and the love of life and children that both of them shared.  Something that I have learned in my constellation work is that the gift of life is the biggest gift of all—and my parents are much, much bigger than I am and always will be even though they are both gone now.

 Oh, and what I wouldn’t give to lay out a scrabble board or grab the berry bucket and head to the woods with my mother just one more time . . . just one more time.

 I miss you, Mom. 

 Love,

 Patti

 P.S.  My legal name is Patricia Lee Lee.  I have gone by “Jamie Lee” for the past twenty years except with my family–all of my brothers and sisters still call me Patti.